Permission to Play

On clarity, migration, and the storytelling that designers still owe the world

A transcription for essay of the opening talk for my “Rich Narratives” workshop, given at UX On The Beach, Venice, Italy, on 9 June 2026. Lightly edited for reading.

The future is going to be different, and it is going to need people like us. The creatives. The ones who sketch before they are sure. We spend our whole working lives making someone else the protagonist — the user, the customer, the person at the end of a long shift. But the story I want to tell you today is a stranger one. This time the protagonist is us. The future will not be designed for us; we are going to have to design it ourselves.

Earlier today Caleb Sponheim, from Nielsen Norman Group, said something I have been turning over ever since: that we should use AI for what it is good at, so that humans are left with the space to do what we are good at. I agree completely. That space is the whole subject of what I want to talk about — and the most critical skill we will need to fill it: creative storytelling.

Think for a moment about what AI actually is. It is a big bowl of soup, ladled from everything researchers could scoop up of what humans have done over the last several thousand years. Which means it can do something remarkable — it can help us become more of what we already know how to be. But it cannot help us stand out. It cannot help us rethink, radically, the situation we are standing in. That still takes real people. It always will.

For a long time, speed was the competitive edge. Whoever shipped first, won. That is over — and not because speed stopped mattering, but because it stopped being rare. AI hands it out now, freely, to anyone with a prompt. So speed has become the new norm: not an edge any longer, but an expectation — the floor everyone is already standing on. The edge has moved somewhere harder to reach. Clarity is the edge now. And here is the wager I want to make with you over the next seventy minutes: that clarity is something we tell our way into long before we can prove it — that the story comes first, and the clarity follows. So I want you to leave knowing how to make that clarity strong, and how to keep it, as designers, as something we own.

Because we are standing at a crossroads, and there are really only two ways to go. We can stay in the room we are in — the room whose ceiling is sinking lower by the month, where the pressure builds and builds as automation presses down and squeezes the creativity out of the air, until there is no space left to think, let alone to make. That is one direction, and it is the one we drift into if we choose nothing at all. The other direction is harder, and it asks more of us. We remodel the building itself. We reshape our organisations so there is room again — space and agency for designers and creatives to do the thing only we can do: to tell the stories of possible and preferable futures, to show our colleagues a vision they can see and stand inside, and to craft from it the momentum and the power that carry a whole company forward – or our organizations, or people.

That is the choice. I know which way I am walking.

To see why, it helps to look back at how design has historically found its way into organisations. Twenty years ago the Danish Design Centre drew a ladder — six rungs describing how design typically arrives, and grows.

On the first rung, there is no design at all; it is bought in, from agencies, when needed. On the second, designers are hired in-house but asked to do exactly what the agencies did — build the product, task by task. On the third, they are finally invited to look wider: to design the services, the processes, the business logic that the tools they build are playing into. The fourth rung is the strategic layer, where designers are in the room when new products, new organisations and new business strategies are being shaped. On the fifth, they help design and implement the transformations to those very systems. And on the sixth, design has become part of the core culture of the company — not dominating, never that, but present as an equal ingredient.

I show you this ladder because we are living through a migration moment, and the ladder is the map.

The new digital reality is that product development, deployment, operations — and, increasingly, product design itself — are being automated, hard. Where we once saw armies of UX and UI designers carefully crafting and driving the production of products, we now see reductions of a factor of ten. Whole teams dissolving. Replaced, sometimes, by a single supercharged specialist, vibe-designing at the centre of it all.

On the numbers, and what “migration” actually means

When I say the execution work is collapsing while the shaping work grows, I am not guessing. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index measured a 26% productivity gain in software development, and found that developers aged 22 to 25 — the ones hired to do the routine build work — saw employment fall nearly 20% in a single year, while their senior colleagues’ headcount kept climbing. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, drawn from over a thousand employers across fifty-five economies, tells the same story from the design side: UI/UX design sits among the fastest-growing roles through 2030, while traditional graphic design is among the fastest-declining. The craft-production layer thins. The shaping layer swells. And McKinsey, hardly a romantic about creative work, found that somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of engineering effort is spent on rework caused by unclear requirements — which is to say, on building the wrong thing clearly. That is the bottleneck. Not the building. The deciding-what-to-build

But here is the thing. When our forefathers found themselves standing on infertile ground, they did not sit down and starve. They migrated. And the ladder points the way. Up. Shift left. Go strategic. Start designing our own roles with the same craft we bring to everything else. Hold on to the oldest truth in the trade — that creativity has always mattered to every organisation that ever hoped to survive, and that designers carry that gift in abundance. The ground we used to stand on, the place from which we drove empathy and ideation and storytelling, is eroding under our feet. So we move. Like the humans before us during the great migrations of pre-history. Like the swallows and the storks, who never argue with the season. They simply find the next fertile ground.

Let me tell you where I am seeing all this from. I was at Amazon Digital Products, building a UX team inside a hardware organisation that had an almost militant idea of what user experience was allowed to be. I was at Nokia, helping introduce the handheld digital future we now all live inside. I was at PayPal, driving user experience into product innovation and carrying the payment product into places it had never quite fit — Italy, Russia, India. I was at LEGO, helping make strategic design thinking a cross-organisational skill for genuinely hard problems: logistics, production planning, tool verification, the strategy for introducing new technology.

What all of it had in common — every single engagement — was that the change was carried, in the end, by a rich narrative. A story strong enough to make people believe the future was already there, just in front of them. Strong enough to make the passage feel simple and low-risk, because the destination was so clear. It was seldom actually simple. But we reached the far side anyway, far more often than not, because when the story was strong the spirit was there, and spirit is what keeps momentum alive long after the slides are forgotten.

Co-creation is a funny thing. It is not only that we go simple — radically, deliberately simple. It is that we build the thing together. And here designers have a bad habit I want to name. We like to go away to do the synthesis. We want the quiet, the peace, the stillness to think. I understand the pull. But stillness has a price, and the price is isolation, and not-invented-here, and the slow forgetting of our most important gift: the insight into what is desirable, what is usable, and what the market, the users, the world will actually accept and adopt when we bring our solutions to them as gifts and offerings.

Now, AI can do something genuinely seductive. It can produce high-fidelity images and artefacts, almost real, like a beautifully crafted fata morgana. And that is exactly the danger. The fata morgana, like the high-fidelity mock-up, shows closure. It looks finished. And closure is the last thing we want when we are trying to invite our colleagues and our neighbours in. When we work in low fidelity — low resolution, rough, sketched — we are sending a signal everyone understands: this is still open. Still yours to interpret. Still waiting for your hand. A sketch is a universally recognised invitation, and not only among artists. It says: come and build this with me. Low fidelity does not mean sloppy. It does not mean we stop making an effort. It means we have learned to carry many openings and many suggestions inside a very few, very deliberate lines.

That is what the workshop is for — the one I am about to take you through, the one I have run for years. It is about putting clarity, trust and relevance back into what we do. An antidote to the AI slop running through our veins and arteries these days. An antidote to the isolation that has been closing around so many of us like a darkness.

Let me give you an example. Do you know the company Too Good To Go? I admire them — for the clarity of their purpose, for the decisiveness of their growth, for the sheer entrepreneurship of the thing. The other day I went to see some old colleagues from my Nokia years who now sit in the leadership there. This is a company born digital to the core, and it is not afraid of AI. Quite the opposite — they have gone AI-first, and they celebrate the speed it gives them, the ability to craft powerful software on the spot. But notice what that speed is in service of. They had learned that up to forty percent of all the food the world produces never feeds a single soul; it is lost somewhere along the way, and a great deal of it is lost in the retail flow. That is the waste these people have set out to stop. And here is the part that stayed with me: they had recently taken their developers and their designers into a large client’s supermarket warehouse at closing time, and simply sat there — watching, asking, listening — as the staff wrestled with the urge to throw it all away, to get their closure, to pack down and go home, and instead found ways to save the food at the end of the day. A company like that points to exactly the future I am describing. A future where designers and product people and developers stand together in the field, where the user experience is built stronger because it is built on the spot, on authentic input, in real iterations — and where, for precisely that reason, it converges and performs in a way no studio-built experience ever can.

But notice what they actually carried out of that warehouse. Not a spreadsheet. A story — the true, particular story of a person at the end of a long shift, fighting the urge to throw good food away. That story is where their clarity comes from, and that clarity is what aligns a whole room of designers and developers and product people around the same horizon. This is the order of things, and it is the one we most often get backwards. Clarity does not arrive first and get dressed in a story afterwards. The story comes first. Storytelling is how we find the clarity, and storytelling is how we carry it to everyone who has to believe in it before it can become real. That is why it is the skill that matters most now. That is why it is ours.

Because creativity is still needed. It is still necessary. What we are missing is not capability — it is permission. Permission to play. To take the most complex and destructive tensions humanity has carried for generations, and to approach them playfully. Playful in serious ways. Playful in a liberating way. How does a team inside a company making drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic — a team full of infighting and genuinely divergent views about the way forward — start walking in parallel instead of pulling apart, and start winning? At the Royal Academy of Design in Copenhagen I have spent years training design leaders and practitioners, future and experienced alike, in exactly these methods of rich narrative co-creation, so that they can go out and change the world for the better.

So let us get into it, and give the next stretch the energy it deserves.

These are the methods we used to help Ørsted, the global leader in offshore wind, work out how to juggle the unstable rhythm of renewable energy production against the hard promises of their contracts. These are the methods we used to ready LEGO for new industrial technologies, when the organisation was struggling to see the big picture. And these are the methods we brought, last year, into one of the great pharma giants — because a story, built together and told well, is still the most reliable way to get a group of people to actually move.

Every time, it was the same sequence. The participants build the plot together, until the focus sharpens onto one protagonist — the person we are really designing for. Then someone presses record, and the story is there: clear and whole, standing out against the clutter. Only then does the clarity arrive — the kind that lets a whole room move as one. The story first. The clarity it earns. That is the order it happens in, and it is the part the machines still cannot do for us.

This is what the migration comes down to. Nobody is going to design this new future for us, so we are going to design it ourselves.

And we can start right here, today.